


Fireside Chats

by JacarandaBanyan



Category: Naruto
Genre: Angst, Angst and Feels, Angst with a Happy Ending, Deidara's suicidal tendencies make a guest appearance, Deidara’s suicidal tendencies, Emotions, Established Relationship, Lot's Of Emotions, M/M, Pyromania, Sasori works through one (1) of his issues, Self-Harm, a little bit, angry cuddling, sorta - Freeform, these guys have weird relationship issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-19
Updated: 2019-01-19
Packaged: 2019-10-12 14:44:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,492
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17469545
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JacarandaBanyan/pseuds/JacarandaBanyan
Summary: Sasori goes into mourning for Deidara, who is very much alive.





	Fireside Chats

**Author's Note:**

> This has been sitting in my WIP folder for over a year, but it's finally done!

It took Deidara a while to figure out what was up with Sasori, but when it finally hit him he chucked a half-finished clay bird at him.

“I’m not dead, danna!”

“I know.”

Deidara groaned dramatically and collapsed sideways into Sasori’s lap. Sasori paused, then adjusted so that his forearms were resting on top of him and his hands were free to continue fiddling with the wires in the miniature puppet arm he was working on. His face stayed blank, but Deidara thought he could sense a hint of fondness, which made him want to preen a little. Less fun was the faint, weary bereavement.

“Then why are you in mourning, hm?”

“Because you will die.”

Deidara scowled and turned away to look at the campfire. “I know _that_ , but normally people wait until someone actually dies to mourn them.”

“I can't wait.”

“Rude. I knew you're an impatient bastard, danna, but I didn't think you were waiting around for me to die.”

Sasori smoothed out some of Deidara’s hair where it had bunched up awkwardly during his dramatics. It was probably an apology. He'd take it as one.

“Don't overreact, brat. You were the one who refused to let me make you immortal like me. You don't even want me to preserve your likeness.”

Deidara scoffed. As if those puppets of his could ever really ‘preserve’ a person. At best they were vaguely creepy reminders of whoever Sasori had based them off. At worst they fueled Deidara's nightmares, the ones where the life was drained out of him and he was left a hollow shell, devoid of personality, and Sasori loved him just the same. Like he couldn't even tell the difference.

Sasori continued as if Deidara hadn't made a sound.

“If I can not preserve you, then I will lose you eventually. That will be unpleasant, and I dislike waiting for unpleasant things.”

“For the last time, you can't make me into a puppet, hm.”

"I know."

Sasori just stared out into the shifting, windswept dunes of sand. His artificial face wasn’t alive enough for wobbling lips, cry-flushing or wrinkling skin, and if he still had tear ducts then they probably released poison instead of saltwater now, but Deidara could easily feel his partner’s grief. It weighted the chilly air until Deidara could feel it pressing like the caress of a dead hand against his bare arms. It pissed him off.

“Well, I’m _so sorry_ to make you wait.”

He stood up and walked away, ignoring the pain of hard puppet fingers being yanked through his hair by the movement and leaving Sasori to continue staring at the barren landscape through lightless eyes. The chilly, heavy air followed him as he walked. The lips of his hand mouths thinned against a sudden gust of wind, and he could feel his hand teeth chattering through the little ripples they send through his palm muscles. He thought about stuffing them inside his cloak, where they might warm up a bit, but decided against it. Something about how his body stayed warm in the face of the dark and the cold and the wind appealed to him right now.

Instead, he reached into his satchel and pulled out some clay. His cold-stiffened fingers had some trouble following the familiar motions of sculpting, but if he managed a decent owl anyway. With another slightly-sluggish hand movement it grew to twice or three times Deidara’s size, and he hopped on its bone-white back.

The wind felt less like an enemy once he was in the air. Up here it was a tool, and even inconvenient, uncomfortable tools were still, at their heart, tools. With a quick tug of chakra, he used the air currents to lift his creation up higher into the sky. He wanted to be high enough up that even the towering, weathered sandstone structures were beneath him.

He wanted to be closer to the heavens than to Sasori.

* * *

Days later, when the dramatic stone and rolling dunes had flattened to nothing at all and Deidara was willing to grace his partner with his presence once more, the subject came up again. Neither of them meant to bring it up, it just sort of seeped up from the porous, sandy earth and polluted their peaceful campsite.

It started when Deidara sat down across the fire from Sasori and began to sculpt himself. Sasori looked up briefly from his puppet’s chest, which was open and bleeding wires and gears, and raised one artificial eyebrow when he caught him staring at the puppet in his lap.

“Lost inspiration for that ridiculousness of yours, brat?” He lilted in that very-nearly human voice of his.

“Never, danna. I just don’t usually sculpt _people_ , and you’ve got an artificial one right there for me to examine. What luck, hm?”

The way the flickering shadows cast by the fire danced across his partners face could almost have fooled him into thinking his was alive. Deidara imagined the fire escaping from its stone confines and engulfing the two of them. The paint would peel from his danna’s face, and then his body would blacken and warp with the heat. The flames would leap higher and higher, fed by raw materials of his puppet body, until the light was so brilliant it blocked out the stars, and all the while their eyes would stay open, Deidara’s out of awe and Sasori’s because he couldn’t feel the smoke and light and heat of his own pyre.

The moment passed, and he went back to shaping his own face out of clay.

When it was finished, he proudly presented it to Sasori, taking childish glee in the knowledge that even if he doesn’t say anything, they both knew it was not destined to be the eternal, unchanging statue that his partner would mistakenly call art. Like everything else, it was doomed to die spectacularly.

“It would make an excellent tombstone,” Sasori murmured with just the subtlest sliver of sadness, and just like that Deidara’s elation sparked out.

“I don’t need one,” he said.

“Not yet,” Sasori lilted. Most people thought his Hiruko voice was the scary one, but Deidara knew better. His own artificial voice, the air blowing through an inhuman throat, was close enough to the real thing to trick you into thinking the dead could speak.

“I’m still here, danna,” he grumbled.

“I know.”

Silence stretched between them, broken only by the crack of the fire. The covert glimpses of Sasori’s face that he managed to snatch through the dancing flames were so contorted by the shadows that he could have sworn that static, carved face was twisted first with anger, then with sadness. It was just an illusion, though. He made sure to remind himself of that. Sasori no longer had the parts necessary for emotional facial expressions.

It made a little flower of sympathetic pain bloom beneath his chest mouth all the same.

When he finished the self-portrait, he set it off to the side a little so it was out of the way. Immediately Sasori’s eyes were trained on it. Not so much as an eyelash moved for several minutes as he stared at it in silence.

“Danna?” Deidara asked. Nothing. He bit his lip and noted that the way the light danced on his sculpture’s face was very similar to how it danced on Sasori.

“I’m gonna go to sleep, hm? When you’re done with your staring contest, take a look at the map and figure out which way we need to go tomorrow.”

That night, he slept away from Sasori, closer than was strictly safe to the fire. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to sleep with him; on the contrary, Hidan’s jokes about him using his partner as a teddy bear weren’t as far off as he probably imagined they were. No, he slept by himself that night because Sasori’s too-still eyes were still staring at his statue, like he was trying to bargain with it, interrogate it, force it with his mind to surrender all the secrets known only to stone and clay and earth.

Deidara wanted to be safely asleep before Sasori realized that he wasn’t going to get an answer to his question, whatever it was. Stone never talks back.

The next day, Sasori was even quieter than usual as they packed up and sealed away their camp gear. Not one joint clacked or creaked, and he hovered so that his feet didn’t disturb so much as a grain of sand on the ground. Silence spread out from him like poison until Deidara found himself walking more lightly than usual around the camp to avoid the crunch of sand on sandal. It made his ears feel overstretched, like they would hear something important if they could only strain a little bit harder.

Only once they had walked several paces away did he break the silence.

“Katsu,” he exploded.

The resulting heat and light warm his body and light the path forward to the edge of the Land of Wind.

* * *

Sasori was awkward to sleep against, but with a thick pillow and some determination, they could make it work. While the puppet master sat cross legged and attended to the minor repairs and upkeep necessary to keep over a hundred puppets in acceptable condition, Deidara would fill the space between his legs with the pillow and sleep with his head in Sasori’s lap.

“You realize that you’re perfectly positioned for me to work on you like one of my works of art, right Deidara?” He teased. Deidara grunted and pressed his face further into the pillow.

“If you did that, wouldn’t all your mourning have been wasted, hm?”

Sasori chuckled. His chest was perfectly still against the side of Deidara’s head.

“It would, wouldn’t it? And right after I’d finished, too.” He sounded- not happy, he’d never sounded happy, but normal. The strange sadness of his self-imposed mourning was absent.

Deidara mumbled something into the pillow.

“I can’t hear you when you don’t speak properly, brat.”

He turned his head so that his lips touched Sasori’s torso.

“I _said_ , so now you won’t be sad if I die?” The vibration of his voice carried the words like a shiver through the perfect puppet body to the gently pulsating core that he couldn’t see but could feel all the same. Sasori had told him that it was a nice sensation, as much as a sensation could be nice for him anymore.

“I’d prefer you embraced true art, but I have accepted that you are unlikely to do anything but die in an obnoxiously big explosion, so. I guess I’ll just have to remember that explosion forever.”

Deidara smirked wide and feral, like a hyena. He whipped his arm out and snatched one of Sasori’s delicate bladed tools up with his palm teeth. He felt a chakra thread start to coalesce on the handle, but surprise had slowed his danna. He rolled sideways out of his lap and towards the fire so that he could swipe the wood handle over the coals. The thread disappeared, and the handle a small flame flared brighter then divided in two, leaving half on the handle.

Sasori leaped to his feet, all traces of easy mirth gone. His eyes fixed upon the tool in Deidara’s hand, and Deidara felt a chill descend upon him, leaving only the hand that held the blade-turned-torch warm. His smile grew wider.

“Are you really okay with it, danna, or do you just say that because you can never admit when something is beyond you?” He kept his voice easy and relaxed, but the veins in his forearm bulged as his muscles tightened and his fingers curled around the blade. A trickle of blood dripped from his fingers like river water escaping through a miniscule hole in a beaver’s dam.

“Put that down, brat. I intended to use that tonight.”

His palm tongue slithered between his clenched fingers and licked the blade. Sasori twitched in disgust.

“You say you’re okay with me dying, but I’d bet you’re only okay with so long as it’s off in the future sometime. You always say you’ll never change, don’t you danna, hm?” He held the torch out between them, throwing light like a blow on his partner’s face. The fire had consumed most of the handle, and the metal grew increasingly hot in his hand.

“I thought you said you would die in one of your precious explosions,” Sasori snarled, but he stayed on his side of the torch. “If you’re going to threaten me with suicide, there’s no need to use my tools to do it.”

He laughed.

“And what if I just let it burn, hm? It’s pretty artistic already. What better image could you get than a burning, bloody blade? I could just watch the art unfold. I don’t mind a little fire, and I’m not afraid to burn. Are you, danna?”

Sasori’s face grew hard, and he sat down again.

“In that case, I’ll watch the show. I hear pyres are supposed to be impressive, I’d think but they last a little long for your tastes, brat.”

"Oh, you underestimate how much fire lights me up inside."

Deidara stared at him as the handle of the torch burned away and his hand began to turn pink, then an angry red. Sasori stared right back. He thought his core might have twitched when the flame reached his hand, but he didn’t dare break their staring contest to look. He was the one throwing down the gauntlet; the only way he was willing to lose was if Sasori gave him the answer he wanted.

The smoke began to smell like burning flesh. Sasori stayed still.

At last he tossed it up into the sky. With his unburned hand he quickly sculpted a small bird that he could probably make in his sleep, which he also tossed into the air. It caught the tool and flew up towards the moon.

“Katsu.”

It exploded, and the pieces began to rain down on the desert like little comets.

Deidara waited until the illumination faded away, then turned back to Sasori. He panted, smile so twisted that it could no longer be called a smile, but still Sasori did nothing.

“I meant it, brat. My mourning is finished. You are dead to me already. Become your art at your leisure. I won’t interfere. I’ll just bear witness, and continue on.”

Warmth exploded behind his chest mouth, and he sank back down into Sasori’s lap. Aside from him, all of Sasori’s favorites were dead, and he liked them a good deal more that way.

Deidara wrapped his unburnt arm awkwardly around him. It pulled unpleasantly on his shoulder, but that was the best thing he’d heard Sasori say in years and he felt like some sort of positive reinforcement was in order.

“You won’t be able to forget it, danna.”


End file.
